Miracle
by mangaluva
Summary: Death doesn't like to leave empty-handed. But death can be dealt with, and Death can make miracles.
1. Miracle

"Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous."

~ _Interesting Times_ by Sir Terry Pratchett

The news that Edogawa Conan, grade-school detective, was in fact Kudo Shinichi, high-school detective, was a shock to many. If it weren't for the weirdness of Conan and the fact that a large number of them had witnessed the child making an emergency transformation into his near-adult self, Division One might not have believed it.

Megure Juzo was not shocked. In fact, he was almost relieved.

He only had _one_ miracle child to worry about.

{}

The Inspector had seen a fair bit of Kudo Shinichi as the boy had grown up, trailing after his father to crime scenes. Part of the police officer was reluctant to call on an amateur so often to solve difficult cases, but Yuusaku _always_ found the truth. He was more reluctant to allow a kid onto crime scenes, but Yuusaku was insistent that bodies didn't worry his son and that it was a good learning experience for the inquisitive child. In fact, Megure got so used to seeing the growing boy shadowing his father around crime scenes that it was odd to see Yuuskau turn up _alone_ to a crime scene. A nurse, poisoned in a hospital break room. Funny thing was, Yuusaku had already been on the scene when Megure arrived.

It wasn't until after the killer—a grieving widower who blamed the nurse's lack of attention to detail for his wife's death—had been arrested that Yuusaku had quietly confided the reason that he was at the hospital. Megure remembered, with sickening clarity, hearing the report on his CB the previous day.

Traffic collision. Driver not paying attention, on his mobile phone, hit a middle-school kid on a crosswalk. It was an accident, not a homicide, so Megure hadn't attended; he'd driven past the scene on his way somewhere else, vaguely noticing the flashing lights of the ambulance as whoever they'd scraped out of all that blood on the road was loaded in, middle-school girls in sailor uniforms clutching each other and crying.

That night, he stopped by the Kudo home on the pretence of discussing some recent cases, really asking for an update on how Shinichi was. Yukiko was sleeping at the hospital, Yuusaku explained flatly as he stepped out of his study. Before the door closed, Megure got a glimpse of books strewn across the floor; heavy, yellow-paged, covered in forms that were neither kanji nor romaji. What looked like burns scored the floor; had there been a fire?

Whatever the books were, Yuusaku didn't talk about them. Only related clinically that Shinichi's injuries were bad, very bad. He was comatose, on life support. The doctors weren't sure that the twelve-year-old would ever wake up. What was in Yuusaku's eyes, Megure had taken to be grief or fear; the flatness in the writer's voice, he'd taken for the man steeling himself against the imminent loss.

Three days later, there was another suspicious death at the hospital, a patient who'd been on the mend and about to leave suddenly pitching out of a third-floor window. Yuusaku had been there, again, still looking grim, looking shadowed, but on the way out Megure had stopped by Shinichi's room and seen that the boy was awake, chatting animatedly to his mother, complaining about the football he wasn't getting to play with his legs in casts. Doctors and nurses were talking about a miracle recovery. It seemed impossible that a boy with those injuries could survive.

A few months later, Kudo Shinichi was out of the hospital without a scratch on him, as if the accident had never happened. In that time, Megure found himself called to suspicious deaths in or around the hospital roughly twice a week.

A miracle had happened.

{}

The homicide rate in Beika continued to grow. Suicides rose, too, but not as noticeably as homicides. Sociologists and criminologists scrambled to explain it, but no sensible explanation presented itself. Nothing rational, nothing logical. Just death.

Kudo Yuusaku seemed to find his way to far too many crime scenes ahead of the police. Perhaps it wore him out as much as it was wearing out Division One, because after a year and a half, while watching a weeping triple-murderess be led away, Yuusaku said that he and Yukiko were moving to America. But Shinichi wanted to stay in Japan, and at fourteen he was old enough to do so.

"Please," Yuusaku said quietly, looking at Megure with shadows in his eyes that had lingered ever since the traffic accident, "look out for him, won't you?"

"Of course," Megure said, though he hadn't seen the boy since the hospital, nearly two years ago.

A week later, he took a fall while chasing a suspect and broke several ribs. At his age and weight, he spent a long time in hospital before he got back on the Force, and then spent a long while on desk work. He occasionally heard officers complaining about a nosy, know-it-all kid butting into their cases, but didn't think much of it; lots of kids were nosy know-it-alls.

His first field assignment, once he was cleared to go back out, was pretty straightforward; fly to the US, pick up a criminal who'd been apprehended there, escort him back. Bring the rookie Takagi, who didn't have a new partner yet after his last one had died in a traffic accident. Simple, easy work for both of them.

Then a corpse was found in the toilet, and Kudo Shinichi was standing over it.

{}

Megure told his superiors that he so often invited an amateur teenager onto crime scenes because Kudo Shinichi, like his father, was _always right._ 100% of cases solved. No case obstructed, or interfered with, or unsolved because of the kid's involvement. They eventually let him get on with it.

Megure was as happy as any cop to see homicides closed neatly rather than left to go cold. But the real truth was that he invited Kudo Shinichi onto murder scenes because he was afraid not to. Because if Kudo Shinichi wasn't invited to see death, it would go looking for him.

Sometimes Megure wondered if he wasn't being ridiculous and would try to get on with his cases without the teenager's involvement. But always, within a few days, he'd go to a crime scene and the boy would already be there, having been doing something innocuous. Playing football on the field next to the public toilets where the body was found. Just buying breakfast and morning coffee in the café when somebody dropped dead. In his trigonometry class when screams rang out because there was a body in the school pool. The kid couldn't even go on a date to the aquarium without a man being stabbed.

So Megure invited Kudo Shinichi along to all the crime scenes he could, not just to see the case closed but because so long as he did, the boy seemed to get along in his normal life corpse-free.

Then one day, after resolving the matter of a man beheaded on a rollercoaster ( _left it too long,_ Megure thought to himself, _should've invited him to the site of that stabbing in Haido the other day, it was a straightforward case that a rookie could crack but maybe if I had—_ ), Kudo Shinichi disappeared. Didn't answer his phone, wasn't already _there_ at any murder scenes… Megure would've been afraid for him if Mouri's daughter hadn't mentioned that Shinichi had called her, said he was away on an unusually tricky case.

He was seeing a lot more of Mouri, much more than he'd seen since the man had left the force ten years before. It was a little sad to see how a decent cop and a decent man had turned into a loudmouthed drunken lout who could only seem to solve a case while in some kind of trance. The trances and sleep-talking were strange and unsettling, but Megure couldn't bring himself to pursue them. He'd already decided that there were things in this world that he just _didn't_ want to know.

He didn't _want_ to notice the little boy trailing around crime scenes with Mouri, and at first, he didn't; Mouri Kogoro himself and his steady rise to prominence as a private detective was fairly big news, especially because of his _unique_ deduction style, but slowly they crept into the memory, the _a-le-le_ s and the little comments and accidents that sparked off real deductions, more and more noticeable when the kid started turning up at murder scenes _without_ Nemuri no Kogoro: with Ran instead, maybe her classmates; with his own classmates, children just as tiny as him crawling all over major crime scenes; with the brat from Osaka; with _FBI_ agents on holiday…

It wasn't _every_ time, but far too often, whenever there was a death, that pair of startling blue eyes was watching, assessing... deducing. _Familiar_ blue eyes, seeing death far too often for the course of the daily life of a grade-schooler.

Megure had never met Edogawa Conan's parents (so he thought), but he wondered if they, like Kudo Yuusaku, had ever been bent over heavy old books full of strange runes, wondered if Edogawa Conan had ever been scraped out of a pool of blood on the street and then, miraculously…

 _Miracle, n._ _An extraordinary event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency._

That Kudo Shinichi survived a drug that had killed dozens of others without a trace, in the end, didn't surprise Megure at all. The boy had survived by a miracle once before, after all, and the miracle had just kept going.

{}

{}

 _This happened as a result of a discussion on tumblr about "The Beika Shinigami" and whether or not Shinichi is legitimately cursed, which started out joking and then I had to make awful. There is a follow-up to this in the works that's more from Shinichi's POV._


	2. Justice

"THERE IS NO JUSTICE," said Death. "JUST ME."

~ _Mort,_ Sir Terry Pratchett.

Humans have a mental divide between "possible" and "impossible". Anything that crosses that line ceases to exist, cannot be thought about.

For a twelve-year-old, thinking about how close you came to dying in a car accident is frightening. So Shinichi didn't think about it, didn't assess his injuries or if they healed or how they healed. He read Sherlock Holmes books and talked to his mother and talked to Ran and talked to his classmates and listened to his father tell him about interesting murders that he'd investigated recently. He didn't think about how many of those murders were in or around the hospital. He didn't think about the odd expression on his father's face or the flat tone in his voice when he talked about the deaths.

Three days after he was discharged from hospital, Shinichi was walking to dinner with his parents—they could have driven, but Shinichi had healed _so_ well, as if he'd never been hurt, and gloried in walking—when a body fell out of a window above them. His father had once been happy to let Shinichi follow him around crime scenes, but now he ordered his wife and son to go home, to leave before the police arrived.

Yuusaku later told Shinichi that he'd solved the case, and that if he ran into anymore, to call Yuusaku first. Shinichi was getting too old to be written off as just a kid when he was on crime scenes, his father said, and sometimes criminals or friends and partners of criminals would seek revenge. Three months later, having run into thirty different murder cases, Shinichi was beginning to wonder if it was something else, but there was nothing else logical it could be. So he called his father every time, left the crime scene, and didn't think about probabilities, or the rising homicide rate in Beika. He told himself about coincidences, even as Holmes whispered in his mind of no such thing.

{}

His parents were flighty, Kudo Shinichi knew. Flighty, and reckless, and whimsical, and given to fly off to any part of the globe at any moment. The fact that they'd actually _planned ahead_ to move to America was more unusual than the move itself.

"Are you sure you won't come with us?" his father had asked quietly, after who-knows-how-many arguments where Shinichi had stubbornly insisted on staying in Japan ("with my friends", he'd said; _with Ran,_ he'd known). "Maybe if you leave Japan, you'll—" He fell silent, cut himself off, didn't finish whatever he was going to say, and Shinichi didn't press him. It edged too close to what he couldn't think about, what he didn't _want_ to think about.

Five days after the move, there was a body floating in the lake at Beika Park and his hand flew to his phone before he realized that his father was on the wrong continent to call. Ran wanted to leave as soon as the police had arrived, but—

"I feel responsible," he'd said.

"Why?" she asked.

 _Because he's dead because of—_

"Because I found the body," he's said.

He solved the murder. It felt a little better. Every time he found a body, every time he solved the murder, he felt a little better. He could tell himself: _if it's not a coincidence, if it's divine providence, then it's because I can solve the murder._

 _The murder would have happened anyway._

That was what he could tell himself every time he solved one.

{}

"You were wrong," he wanted to say to his father, after one body on a plane, another on a stage, and a third left behind in an abandoned building in the rain. "You were wrong. Nothing would've changed if I'd come to America."

But Yuusaku wasn't in New York. Working on a novel, his mother said. So he focused on making Ran smile again, and envied her ability to forget.

{}

"It's a miracle that you survived," Miyano Shiho, formerly called Sherry, now calling herself Haibara Ai, once said. "Why is it that _you_ , among all other victims, didn't die?"

Part of him thought: _because all the others did._

It was ridiculous. It was illogical. It was _impossible._

So was turning into a child.

So was surviving being run over by a car, chest shattered, head smashed into the road; so was surviving that and walking away without a trace.

{}

If things hadn't been so serious, it would've been funny, the looks on their faces when Kudo Shinichi appeared in the place of Edogawa Conan. Chiba was clutching his head like it was about to explode. Shiratori was gaping like a fish, opening and closing his mouth with no sound coming out. Sato had her hands out, wibbling "But—you—Conan—Kudo—?!" over and over, before yelling at Takagi to get the poor boy some pants, which her equally flustered boyfriend had done, diving into the back of _her_ car for his spare clothes (and if things hadn't been so serious, oh, how angry the rest of Division One would've been to think of why Takagi's yesterday clothes were in the car of the flower of Division One).

Only Megure looked unsurprised. If anything, he looked _relieved._ Shinichi thought of how many cases the portly Inspector had invited him on, and how when he was getting invited on cases, he wasn't tripping over corpses in his daily life.

Then there was work to be done, there were killers to be arrested, there was no time because this one might be permanent and might not be, and all Shinichi could think was that if death was following him, he hoped, just for once, it would be on his side.

{}

There was no disabling shot, and Akai didn't bother trying for one. Gin had one arm around Shinichi's throat and his gun jammed into Shinichi's ribs, holding the teenage detective between himself and the police, up until the moment when through a window and from the top of a building more than six hundred yards away, Akai finally blew his _koibito_ 's brains out. As the body fell, Shinichi felt disgust, he felt relief that the man who'd once tried to kill him could never try again, felt _safe_.

Other Bo members died as a result of the raids, of the fighting, and every time Shinichi thought, _maybe_ _that'll be enough. Maybe it's sated. Maybe that'll be it, that stretcher carrying a black trenchcoat, a uniform—nobody I know, not Megure not Sato not Takagi—carrying a black suit, carrying dark skin—_

 _NO_

He'd panicked, when he thought he was cornered, called for help, called for a friend that he knew would always jump to his aid without thinking, who knew everything. Then he had no choice and the police saw anyway, and he'd thought, surely, with all of the police officers, all the FBI, maybe if _this_ was real so was the power of that omamori—

Fragile old chain links had once stopped a knife to the gut, after all. Couldn't stop a bullet to the heart, not to the core and most important part of Hattori Heiji in more ways than just the physical.

It had never come so close before. He could avoid thinking about it when it wasn't close, when it was people he didn't know dying for reasons unconnected to him. And people kept telling Shinichi that it wasn't his fault, it was the police's for not protecting the headstrong teenager in their midst, it was the fault of the black-clad killer who'd shot him, and they didn't _understand_.

Maybe Megure did, when he put a hand on Shinichi's shoulder and whispered, "it really isn't your fault, Kudo-kun. You didn't choose this. You never chose any of this. It isn't your fault."

It wasn't his fault, he knew, but it was because of him. He was responsible for this.

{}

He didn't go to the funeral. Couldn't face Hattori's parents, couldn't know if they would stand as still as statues or if grief would shatter their statuesque demeanours; couldn't see the classmates, the officers, all the friends and people who had been part of Hattori's life when he wasn't part of Shinichi's, all the people whose lives now bore a Hattori Heiji-shaped hole.

Couldn't watch Kazuha cry, not like he knew she would, not like the way Ran had over Shinichi leaving her but ten thousand, ten _million_ times worse because Hattori would never call, never fleetingly appear, never be any more than ash and stillness and death that should never have been powerful enough to contain the overwhelming spirit of the Detective of the West.

 _If only you'd never come to Tokyo that day,_ Shinichi thought. _If only you'd never come on that Holmes-lovers' retreat, if only you'd never come when I called, if only I'd died in that car crash—_

The APTX cure had worked, for real this time, and as soon as he was sure of that he disappeared again, and this time didn't call.

{}

Nowhere was far enough. Every town he stopped in, every hotel or motel that he stayed in housed a corpse by morning; he slept in a bus shelter and witnessed one man smash another's head off the pavement in a drunken rage; he kept going, kept moving, just going from train to train and sleeping in his seat, and awoke to screaming because there was a woman dead in the toilet.

He reached Hokkaido and went walking, heading along a camping trail that should have been near-empty in the winter cold, and found the corpse of a hiker with an axe buried in his back on day three. He went off the paths, further and further from humanity, from people he could hurt, and one night was awakened by fire all around him as a plane crashed into the forest where he was hiding. One look at the pilot's body told him that the plane had crashed because the pilot had been shot in the head.

There was fire and burning debris all around him, but not one part had fallen on him.

 _It_ had saved him, like it had saved him from the ATPX, like _it_ had saved him from blood loss and bullet wounds, like _it_ had saved him from the car crash. _It_ had saved him, and _It_ had killed Hattori.

{}

Nowhere was far enough. He left Japan, went across East Asia, and _It_ followed him all the way. He couldn't get far enough from other people. He got a junker car and drove as far out into the middle of nowhere in Russia—and no country on earth does stretches of _nothing_ like Russia—and found out that a man who had murdered his brother had had the same idea and was halfway through burying the body.

He no longer solved cases when he came across them; it made no difference. He kept moving, kept his head down, didn't try to trace the trail of bodies he left behind him, always wondering _why._

Then one morning, at a train station somewhere in the Balkans, Shinichi's train from he'd-already-forgotten-where to he-didn't-care stopped to pick up new passengers, and once it was moving somebody sat down next to him.

"You idiot," Ran said softly. "You're still using your dad's credit card."

The train was moving and it was four hours to the station and Shinichi didn't think he'd ever been so afraid. His protestations that Ran should stay away from him fell on deaf ears, his insistence that she get off at the next station and go home wrought only tears and rage and _I don't understand_ and _I miss you_ and _don't you love me anymore_ and _I love you_ and _please don't leave me again_ —

When he tried to explain, he realized, he just sounded mad, paranoid, delusional. The more he tried to explain, the more Ran wanted to take him to hospital, the closer she clung to him, afraid that if she took her eyes off him for a second, he'd disappear. They fought the whole four hours to the next station, fought as she dragged him off the train without either of their luggage, fought in the middle of a German street where Ran finally screamed:

"Hattori-kun's death wasn't your _fault,_ Shinichi! You're not some—some Shinigami! I mean, I've known you your whole life, haven't I? We've been together every day of our lives, even when you were _Conan_! And _I'm_ fine, aren't I?"

 _That_ was the thought that undid him. Ran, who'd come to the hospital to visit every day, who he walked to school with every day, who was there in New York, the aquarium, Tropical Land…

 _Lucky_ Ran, who always won the games, who always ended up on the best side of chance and coincidence…

She was fine, wasn't she?

{}

Sato punched her husband when he made a joke about how all of their jobs had been boring with Shinichi away. Everyone still called her Sato-san. Neither she nor Takagi seemed to mind; they were too wrapped up in each other. They dealt in death every day, but they were with the person they loved, and that made none of the rest of it matter.

Shinichi tried to believe that it could be enough for him too. Ran wanted to believe that he was back home, back to normal, solving cases by day and going to school at night to get his high school equivalency. She saw a path for him, of getting his diploma and going to college and joining the police and trying to do what he loved, and he _so_ wanted to believe it that he followed her path doggedly, followed _her_ doggedly because he could no longer find a path for himself, because if he wrapped himself up in her smiles and light and her _belief_ that what he did was good he could almost believe it himself.

And Megure still called him out onto cases, and as long as he did, Shinichi didn't find corpses in his night school or dropping on his head while he walked around or while he was on dates with Ran. She was enjoying college, shining in the drama club and glowing with satisfaction as she worked towards her teaching certification and continuing to excel at karate—

There was no reason for anybody to think it had anything at all to do with Shinichi and, logically, rationally, it didn't. Serious injuries could happen in high-level karate tournaments, everybody knew that. Ran had broken another woman's arm, didn't mean to, but she had. Accidents happened. The woman had been a professional, karate had been her life before her elbow was permanently damaged, and she knew that accidents happened. Should have known that, should have accepted it. Should have sought help when she grew lost and depressed, not alcohol. Should have gotten a therapist, not a gun.

Ran could parry punches, kicks, knives, axes. She'd dodged a bullet once, but only because she'd seen it coming. Nobody saw it coming until it had been, right through her throat, and she'd breathed her last in Shinichi's arms, trying to whisper something that she couldn't put voice to, not with the hole in her neck pouring blood and air and life—

"It's not your fault," Megure said quietly, some time later, after things had happened that Shinichi hadn't really taken in, lost in the darkness again without his path or his light.

"It's because of me," Shinichi responded, because Megure _understood_ , he was sure he did.

"I'm sorry," Megure sighed. "I thought, if I kept bringing you in, maybe—"

"I thought so too," Shinichi said, walking away. "I'd hoped so too."

That night, he tried to hang himself, in the library, off one up the upstairs railings. The rope snapped, and he collapsed, unconscious but breathing. When he came to, he heard sirens outside, and looking outside he car tire marks tracked in blood, and police officers talking to Agasa-Hakase and three crying children, one blonde, two dark-haired, and Shinichi couldn't bear to look any longer to see which children were crying and thus which one was the small lump on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.

{}

Shinichi didn't answer the door when he heard knocking, but he must've left it unlocked, because Megure walked into the library and said, "It's not your—"

"Say something new, Megure-keibu," Shinichi said, sitting on the desk, staring at the broken rope still dangling from the upper gallery, his voice hoarsened by the bruise around his throat. Megure gaped. "Don't worry, I don't dare try again. It won't let me. It won't let _me_ die."

"Kudo-kun…" the older man said, flinching from the emptiness in the young man's eyes.

"What happened to me?" Shincihi whispered. "Do you know? You know _something_ , don't you? Why? _Why didn't I die_? Why _can't_ I?"

Megure sighed deeply. "I don't know," he admitted. "Not exactly. But… your father does, Shinichi-kun. He knew _something¸_ I'm sure… he seemed to expect everything that came after your… accident."

"Haven't spoken to them in… years," Shinichi realized. "Not since before Hattori…" His throat closed up as he looked despairingly at Megure. _Hattori… Ran… how many more_ …?

Megure put a hand on Shinichi's shoulder, as he had so many hundreds of times, then looked at the broken noose and the death in the eyes of the young man that he'd known since he was a bright-eyed little boy following his father around crime scenes, and felt very old and very tired.

Instead, Megure gave Shinichi a hug. "You never deserved this," he said.

"Thank you," Shinichi replied, with the most warmth he'd had since Ran's death. "Thank you for everything."

{}

Yuusaku and Yukiko came for Ran's funeral, to mourn the girl who they'd thought of as a daughter-in-law since she'd been in grade school. Shinichi was present, but appeared to hear no condolences, no crying from Sonoko, no whispered apologies from Eri, no enraged yelling from Kogoro, who was drunk at ten in the morning and had to be removed by some of the police officers in attendance when he tried to attack the caretakers who came to take Ran's casket to cremate her. He stood over Ran's casket and looked down at what was lying in it, but it wasn't Ran. Ran was smiles and tears and fire and rage and light, and now she had gone out.

Throughout the funeral, all he really saw was his father, watching him for any sign that he'd known this was coming, that this was what he'd _expected_.

He didn't look surprised when Shinichi said he was leaving the wake early. He looked a little more unsettled when Yukiko grabbed his arm and said that they were leaving too.

"Goodness, Yuusaku, we at least have to steer him home," Yukiko chastised her husband as she had to half-drag him out of the door to where their son was standing, waiting for them with blank eyes and the tops of bruises peeking out over his white collar and black tie. "And you need to tell him, Yuusaku. For God's sake, even if you _still_ won't tell _me_ , you owe it to your son!"

Shinichi wasn't sure how they got from there to the library—the rope was gone; had Megure taken it down? He couldn't remember—but finally he found the voice to ask, "Why? Why didn't you just… let me _die_?"

"Shin-chan!" Yukiko gasped, her hands flying to her mouth.

"You know why," Yuusaku said, staring at the dark, empty fireplace.

"You could leave me behind," Shinichi pressed, drawing another sob out of his mother and he didn't _care_ , they were _alive,_ he hadn't gotten them killed yet, wasn't that _enough_? "Why couldn't you let me go?"

"That is in no way the same—!" Yuusaku burst out. He rubbed his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. "I never thought… I never thought it would be like this," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, Shinichi, I'm _so_ sorry…"

"Just… tell me what you did," Shinichi bit out. "Tell me how I can _undo_ it. Please… tell me how to _die_!"

"Shin-chan, no!" Yukiko sobbed, grabbing her son's shoulders. "Shin-chan, do you understand what you're _saying_?!"

"You know as well as I do that I should have _died_!" Shinichi yelled, throwing her hands off. "I should have _died_ under that car, but I didn't, and ever since I haven't been able to go _three days_ without somebody dying around me! People have been dying in my place for _ten goddamn years_! Do you even _know_ how many?! No! Because you _ran away_! Because you _knew_ , didn't you? You _knew_ that if you got too close to me, then you'd wind up—like Hattori—like _Ran_ —" A sob ripped through his damaged throat, filling him with so much pain that he could only slump in the tall wingbacked chair by the fireplace, clutching his chest as his sobs hurt too much to breathe.

"Shinichi…" he heard his father say. "I'm sorry. Gods, I'm sorry, I thought—" He took a deep, wavering breath. "I'll tell you," he said softly. "I'll tell you how I kept you alive. But you—you can't ever ask me how I found this out. Please don't ask me what I had to— _how_ I learned that…" Trailing off, he walked past Shinichi, getting on his knees and crawling into the cold fireplace. There was a scraping of stone.

"You told me we weren't using that safe anymore because you'd lost the combination," Yukiko said quietly. Yuusaku said nothing, just removed more bricks, then there was the _clicking_ of a dial, then the scraping of metal. Yuusaku straightened up, clutching something to his chest.

"Whatever's keeping you alive," he said softly, "whatever's taking the lives of others, it—it came out of _this._ "

He pressed a large, clear jewel into Shinichi's hands.

The facets were discordant, and it was light for its size, as if it were somehow hollow inside.

{}

{}

 _I'm sorry, I'm a terrible person and I can't even blame Key for it, she just said a little thing and I ran with it and did terrible things. I don't think I've written anything like this since_ Moonlight Sonata… _stay tuned for part 3._


	3. Mercy

"If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you are going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the murder like another man will put off a good cigar.

So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word."

~ _Men At Arms,_ Sir Terry Pratchett

 _It's a trap,_ he knew. It always was with Suzuki Jirokichi, but this was different. This was _odd_. Usually the old man loved to crow about the difficulty he'd gone to in obtaining his latest piece of Kid-bait, but this time he said nothing but that it came from an anonymous donor, and that was enough to set off warning bells.

The jewel itself was curious enough to distract everyone from the issue of the mysterious person giving away jewels. A diamond, appraisers said, definitely a diamond, of a flawless round cut, but the facets appeared strange and combined with its oddly light weight relative to its size, more than one appraiser had suggested that the jewel was somehow _hollow_ inside, though no parts of the jewel came apart in any way. A solid, hollow diamond.

It was a trap. It couldn't have been any more a trap if it was orbiting the forest moon of Endor.

But so what? The Kaitou Kid never turned down a challenge. The Kaitou Kid teleported, walked on air, flew. The Kaitou Kid passed through walls and security systems like a phantom and danced in and out of traps as he pleased.

Besides, he suggested, if it _was_ a trap set by _Them_ —and who else would know to use such bait?—didn't that mean that _They_ would certainly be there?

All the more reason to go.

"Be careful," she said before he left, as she always did. "It's not worth your life."

And because _she_ said it, he could believe it.

{}

The Kaitou Kid danced under the moonlight as it glinted off of nets and magnets and all the other traps that the obsessed mind of Suzuki Jirokichi could conjure, and none of them were ever enough, none of them ever _could_ be enough. Mere traps could never capture the Kaitou Kid. And minds that could… were in short supply.

The Kaitou Kid kept an eye on his favourite pursuers, because minds sharp enough to capture _him_ might just be sharp enough to capture the shadows that trailed after him with guns in hand. Hakuba Saguru was the first, he got _so_ close to figuring out the truth, but his focus was too narrow, so set on figuring out _who_ the Kid was that he never spared enough time to figure out _why_ , and the Kaitou Kid had no time for detectives who would _demand_ the truth rather than _deduce_ it.

Kudo Shinichi was the second, and third, as Edogawa Conan, not that Kid had known it at the time. Nobody had until the day that the strange child, so sharp and so haunted, transformed into a teenager in front of the eyes of many shocked police officers, and word had spread among the police force. Nobody who had experienced Edogawa Conan could disbelieve something as absurd as somebody turning into a child, least of all one of the few people (un)lucky enough to have been the boy's target more than once.

He was the closest, Kid was sure, but Kudo Shinichi's life had been regained at the time that Hattori Heiji's (number four, perhaps, strong sense of justice but oh so reckless, oh so incautious) had been lost, and Kudo had not returned to the case of the Kaitou Kid nor any other case at all for more than a year. The detective vanished again, this time without leaving a tiny near-clairvoyant in his place. With Hakuba in England and Hattori dead, that left Kid with nobody at all who could come close to catching him—or catching _Them._

He was almost ecstatic when the detective reappeared, returned to work on the city's diminished murder rate (which had dropped due to the end of that huge criminal organization, people said; which had dropped due to the disappearance of a Shinigami, some police whispered where the officers of Division One couldn't hear them), returned to chasing the Kaitou Kid. _This time,_ Kid had thought, _this time he'll figure it out, he_ has _to—_

And then there had been a death on a heist, not some killer taking advantage of the heist to kill some victim but some killer taking advantage of a heist to kill Kid and missing, and Kudo Shinichi never attended a Kid heist again, and did that matter when the police _knew_ now?

It mattered. It mattered because godammit, he _should_ have just _told_ somebody, should never have let this be the price, should've just told Kudo, or Hakuba, or Nakamori-keibu—

Tonight there was nobody who could lay a hand on the Kaitou Kid (one he'd _let_ , perhaps, but not on a heist, not yet) and in no time he was bursting onto a rooftop, into the moonlight, oddly light diamond nestled in his hand, free and—

—not alone, he realized, whirling on a shadow that moved around a chimney, surprised to find himself sighting his card gun on Kudo Shinichi.

"It's been a long time, Tantei-kun," Kid said softly, the unspoken end of that sentence beginning with _not since—_ "You have my sincerest condolences," he added, "on your recent loss."

Kudo just nodded. Kaito took in the detective that had once been his doppelganger; thin, stubble dusting his face, so pale that all the clearer were the dark shadows under Kudo's eyes and _around his neck—_ normally, perhaps, Kid would assume that the detective had been on the receiving end of an attempted strangling from a suspect, but less than a week after the death of Mouri Ran, the girl in the red dress who the world could see held Kudo's life on the end of a red string, and now that string dangled torn and bleeding from Kudo's finger and he was regarded as as good as a widower…

"Have you checked it yet?" Kudo asked softly. "Against the moonlight, like you always do? Or is it 'not the jewel I'm looking for'?"

"This is you, eh, Kudo?" Kid said, holding out the jewel, allowing the moonlight to glint off of it. "Did you miss me after you stopped chasing me, so much so that you had to turn to the old man's methods to draw me out?"

"I'm not here to catch you, Kid," Kudo sighed tiredly, hands shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched. "But when I thought about your choice of targets when it comes to thefts, I wondered if you might know anything about Pandora."

If anything could crack Poker Face, if anything was _allowed_ to crack Poker Face, it was that word, those seven letters that were responsible for how far Kuroba Kaito's world had been shattered and twisted…

There were a million and one reasons that he was grateful for Nakamori Aoko. Her timely appearance on the rooftop, distracting Kudo from any cracks that might have been visible in the Kaitou Kid's beloved Poker Face, immediately joined the list.

"Ka—Kid!" she yelled, spotting Kudo and the thief facing off across the rooftop, raising her old revolver (though she'd never fire it, not at him). "Don't move! Kudo-san… what are you doing here? Nobody told me you'd be on this case…"

"I'm not," Kudo said with another listless shrug. "I'm not here to catch the Kaitou Kid. Nor to ask why it is that you, Nakamori-san, always seem to find the Kaitou Kid, yet only manage to bring other police officers with you when the killers in black who are so interested in gunning Kid down are also attending a heist. I'm here to ask about Pandora."

Aoko was well-versed in giving away nothing in front of police officers, a hair-trigger temper that was more controlled than anybody but another master could suspect forming her own Poker Face, yet this was enough to crack her too. "How… how do you know?" she whispered, eyes darting frantically from Kid to Kudo. "How does he…?!"

"Tell me what you want it for," Kudo said, gesturing to the jewel, "and I'll tell you where the rest of it is. Where the core is."

For the Kaitou Kid, secrets and lies came as easily as breathing, and the former were perhaps the reason he could still do the latter. Telling the truth, the _full_ truth, had come to him once, only once, on the verge of losing something more precious to him than his own life, and even now, with Pandora possibly in his reach, he was hesitant to show even a single card without first seeing his opponent's hand. "How did you come into possession of such a thing?" he asked instead.

Kudo twitched, his own emotions not remotely under control, flashing pain, rage, grief… "What do you want it for?" he pressed monotonously. "Immortality?"

Kaito didn't allow his face to move, but he looked to Aoko, as she looked to him. Her eyes flashed from the jewel to Kudo, widening, an impatient look crossing her face; Aoko-speak for _tell him_!

"I want to destroy it," Kuroba Kaito admitted softly.

" _We_ want to destroy it," Aoko said stubbornly, lowering her gun, willingly damning herself along with Kaito if Kudo was indeed stringing them along, but it seemed increasingly unlikely of the grieving, shadowed detective who was now leaning against the chimney behind him as if he needed support to stand.

But there was an odd gleam in Kudo's eyes as he looked from Kaito to Aoko, from the impassive face to the expressive. Which was more telling? "Really," he murmured. "You'd really destroy your chance at immortality?"

"We don't _want_ it!" Aoko burst out. "Who _would?!_ Living forever just means outliving everybody you love…" Her fists shook as they clenched around her father's gun. "But _They_ want it," she said in a low, furious voice. "They want it so bad They'd _kill_ for it. It's the only thing _They_ really care about. It's all we can take from Them, so we _will_."

Kudo smiled and it was a _wrong_ smile, splitting his face like an open wound, lighting his eyes with something that was not happiness.

"Swear it," the detective breathed, clutching his chest as if he had to manually push the words from his lungs. "Swear that you'll destroy it."

"On the grave of my father," Kaito promised because this was _it_ , he was so _close_ , he could end it all and who _cared_ what Kudo might or might not know or figure out now—

"And mine," Aoko added. She backed up nervously when the broken pieces of a laugh rattled out of Kudo's throat.

"It's _me_ ," the detective gasped, broken grin ripping wider, wildly, as he slumped to his knees and held his hands out to them, begging, praying, pleading. "The core's in _me._ You have to destroy _me_!"

{}

The ever-smiling Kaitou Kid knew rage, knew hate, knew _anger_. Anger was poured into his lungs as his father burned under the lights of a stage, filling his throat until he choked on it, and the only person who could _make it better_ turned to ash before his eyes. He loved his mother too but she was burning too, from the inside out, and his father had taught him _Poker Face,_ had taught him _smile no matter what,_ had taught him _a magician makes others happy_ —

So into the marrow of his bones he hid the anger, where it could not be seen, would not leak into his smile or laugh no matter how much it poisoned his blood. An _accident_ left him with rage without purpose, anger without a target, so he hid it so well that nobody could smell it fester…

Until he found out that Kuroba Toichi had not been _lost._ He'd been _taken_. That fire that had killed his father, had seared invisible pain deep into his mother's skin and choked his lungs with anger, had made somebody _smile_ , has smelled to them of _satisfaction_. Not an accident, but a murder. A _reason_. A _target._

And he came so close, _so close_ sometimes to letting the poison in his veins overwhelm him, even as he smiled and danced under the moonlight and made the crowds cheer and laugh and believe that they knew that "Kaitou Kid _doesn't kill_ ", when he knew that the truth was "Kaitou Kid _hasn't killed yet_ ".

And then that night, _that night,_ the last time Kudo came on a Kid heist, when it went _bad_ and he was left in the small hours in a dark house with the glow of a television reflecting off the tears on her cheeks as he stood with his father's blood still staining his suit, apologizing over and over and over but what she wanted wasn't apologies, she wanted the _truth_ , and what right did he have to deny her? When could he _ever_ have denied her? So he opened his veins and poured out his poison, and she held it in her hands and her heart and somehow wasn't tainted, and managed to wrap unsoiled arms around him that spread _cleanness_ into his bones, and all she wanted an apology for was not telling her sooner, for not _trusting_ her, for believing that her hate was so much greater than her love that she wouldn't listen to _him_ , that it would obliterate all her capacity for reason and understanding

And what could he do but apologize? What could he do but fall at her feet when she felt the same loss, the loss of her _only_ parent being _taken_ from her, when that hatred poured into her and she weathered it and it left her pure when it had tainted everything he was? When her heart was so much greater than her hate that she could take him in her arms and not be poisoned, when she could purify him instead, when she could hold him close and whisper

" _I won't let you if you won't let me_."

And that was how they'd been ever since, as she completed her police academy training and joined the police as a rookie officer in the Kaitou Kid Task Force, just a rookie but half-jokingly called the True Heir of the Task Force, her plans and orders listened to just as raptly as those of the official head of the Task Force, Onishi-keibu, who went to the police academy with her father and has been chasing Kid almost as long but catching the Kaitou Kid wasn't in his _bones_ like it was in hers

(Nobody needed know that he was already caught, always was)

And nobody could match the passion of her fury when Kid's shadows with guns appeared again, the ones that shot down _their_ Nakamori-keibu, because he had one daughter but a whole Task Force who struggled every time to keep their longing for revenge restrained by their sakura emblems

(And he knew that they wouldn't ever go easy on him, that if he deserved to be caught then he would be caught, even by _her_ , and maybe someday he would be, but he also knew that they rated catching the black-clad killers above catching him and he was okay with that, because there were darker stains than him on the night and all he wanted was to bring them to the light, it was all he'd ever wanted)

And that's how they lived, two people who stored anger and hate inside of themselves and keep it from poisoning each other with the strength of their love for each other, because each cleansed themselves with the other's belief that they were clean

And then a broken mirror of Kaito knelt on a rooftop and begged them to kill him.

And when they said nothing, when they were shocked into saying nothing, when they began to protest, he cut them off with a phone number that he knew Kaito could memorize and told them that the jewel was cursed and took life all around him, and that until they decided to kill him they should stay away because it wouldn't be safe

That for tonight it was sated, he'd seen to that, nobody _else_ should die tonight

And after he walked away they found three bodies in black behind the chimney that Kudo had been standing behind, all shot and dead and one of them was _him_ , one of them was Snake, the killer of fathers now killed himself, a shot between the eyes freezing his last expression of shock on his face, and now neither of them would ever know what they truly were or if their love was stronger than their hate, if their belief was stronger than their poison, if they could have the strength to give him a fair trial and lock him away and be the people that their fathers wanted rather than being the rage left in their fathers' wake

They would never know, because now somewhere out there the revenant of a good man started to believe that if he killed the bad then the good might live, and a Shinigami had begged them to kill him, and suddenly it seemed so much less difficult to decide whether or not to kill a man who may have deserved death than to kill one who certainly wanted it.

{}

"Hi, you've reached Kudo Shinichi. Please leave a message after the beep. If you're calling about a case, make certain to leave your name, the names of any suspects and victims and your phone number after the beep."

"Shinichi, please, even if you don't want to speak to me, at least call your mother. She's worried about you. We haven't seen you since… the funeral. Please at least let us know that you're okay."

{}

Dawn found Kuroba Kaito in the Blue Parrot, rolling around his mouth a question for its elderly proprietor, who ought to have long since closed but always had time for the young man stumbling in his fathers' shoes.

Dawn found Nakamori Aoko driving to her childhood home, long sold when it became void of a _family_ and was too big to be home to an orphan, to the household next door that had been as much home to her as the one belonging to her father, where a widow lived alone but for her gratitude that her son had left home under his own power and not in a coffin.

"Did he ever find Pandora?" he asked, she asked. "Did you _know_ that Pandora had been found?"

"Perhaps," the old man said.

"Yes," the widow said, "but I never knew what became of it. He hid it, I'm sure, but I never knew where."

"He behaved oddly after his last heist," the old man said, "but then came his last show…"

"He was going to tell me after the show," the widow said, fingers fidgeting with her wedding ring.

Nobody knows, they both realized, they both told each other, but a dead man. Perhaps, had they lived more normal lives, had they lived _good_ lives, lives lacking in magic and immortality, that would have meant the end of their search.

{}

"Hi, you've reached Kudo Shinichi. Please leave a message after the beep. If you're calling about a case, make certain to leave your name, the names of any suspects and victims and your phone number after the beep."

"Shinichi, what are you doing? The police haven't joined the dots yet—I'm sure they aren't too worried about the random stabbings of some muggers, some drug dealers, some known low-level yakuza—but I have. I know what you think you're doing, Shinichi, and this is _not_ the answer. How could you think this is okay?! This isn't what I saved you for!

…I'm sorry. I'm sure you feel you owe me nothing. You didn't ask for this. But please… this isn't what _she'd_ want you to be, is it?"

{}

Kaito had never kept in touch with his old classmates after school. It had been so much easier to keep people at a distance, to have acquaintances rather than friends who could be disappointed by learning the truth.

But Aoko had kept in touch, had made friends with _everybody_ , had made her way into people's lives by brute-force friendliness, and so it was she who contacted Koizumi Akako to ask her about speaking to the dead at an ungodly hour of the morning, and it was somehow unsurprising that the self-proclaimed witch was awake to answer her phone.

"It takes more than a Ouija board to communicate with those who have passed," Akako told them, after greeting them at her door and inviting them into a parlour that would intimidate the most devout Goth. "It is not given to the living to speak to the dead. There is a price that must be paid. However," she added, "at this point I have already sworn my soul to so many different entities that there shall be _quite_ the battle for it should I ever actually die. So if it's that important that you're _willing_ to believe in my powers, Kuroba-kun, Aoko-chan… then, yes, I shall call a ghost for you. To whom do you wish to speak?"

Neither Kaito nor Aoko thought much about the implications of the strange things that Akako often said anymore. When she spoke of demons, creatures, magic, they learned to trust that she knew what she was talking about, even when they didn't. They asked no questions, merely sat silent until Aoko could bring herself to answer, to speak the words "Kuroba Toichi".

Akako merely looked at them, and smiled, and said nothing. She had done so a thousand times, and it had meant four thousand different things.

So the officer and the thief found themselves at the edge of a circle, etched with the runes of a lost language, listening to somebody that they attended high school with speak in a language that she had not spoken for a thousand years, calling to the dead.

And the dead answered. In the centre a man appeared in flames, a man who was last seen in flames, flames that curled around him but did not intercept his deep-sea gaze as he tried to speak soundlessly.

"You are permitted three questions," Akako said, beginning to paint her nails as if already bored by the proceedings. "He can only answer the questions. Use them wisely."

"Otou-san," Kaito whispered. Kuroba Toichi reached for his son, but could not speak until a question was asked.

"How do we destroy Pandora?" Aoko asked hoarsely, tears glimmering on her cheeks as they had at Toichi's funeral, when Kaito had not known how to cry and she had cried for him, always the emotion that broke through his Poker Face

"The Pandora itself is fragile," Toichi said and his voice was so faint, like wind that slips straight through the ears and into the memory and there seats itself forever. "Outside of its shell, it is easily destroyed. Find the core—not the shell, but the core—and you could grind it under your heel."

The core was easily destroyed, but they knew where the core was, and its current container was not so effortlessly eradicated. "If the core of Pandora is in a human," Kaito asked, pouring all of his Poker Face into not choking on the words, "how do we get it out?"

Toichi hesitated, but had to answer. "What I have learned is that if a healthy human becomes one with Pandora during a full moon, they will be protected forever," he explained, "but if a human prays to Pandora on the verge of death, then Pandora can only be removed by the death that was undone." He tried to speak more, but nothing else could be heard.

"Is there—" Kaito began, but quickly fell silent, unwilling to waste his third question on a rhetorical question. Were there any other way to remove Pandora's "protection" from a human without killing them, he was sure, the former and true Kaitou Kid would have revealed it, even if only in riddle. But the more he turned over his father's words in his mind, the more he felt unpleasantly sure that there was no way to end Kudo Shinichi's curse… but to end _him_.

He drank in what he could of his father's appearance, what he could see in the flickering ghostflame, neatly parted hair a mess at the back, dark blue eyes crinkled at the corners as if perpetually smiling, a small moustache framing a mouth that ever hid its silent secrets under amusement, yet even now silently moved…

After long silence, Aoko looked to him, as if expecting him to ask more, but he had nothing. So Aoko, ever straightforward, squared her shoulders, cleared the tears from her throat and asked:

"What is it that you want to say to Kaito?"

Kaito could never have thought of such a deviously frank question.

"I love you very much," Toichi said, his own voice choked, reaching as if his semi-transparent fingers could touch Kaito outwith the circle. "I want you to know that, and I want you to tell Chikage that I love her too, and that I await her, and that I hope to wait a long time yet. I want to tell you, Kaito, that I am so incredibly proud of everything that you've done, all that you've sought to achieve, and all that you intend. And I want you to know that I know what kind of man you have become, and that there is no action that you could take that could _ever_ disappoint me… save breaking Aoko-chan's heart," he added with a smile that made Kaito sob as he grinned. "You cannot make me disappointed in you. Especially not when you are returning the valuable things in this world to where they belong. I love you, Kaito…"

Either he or the realm of the dead had decided that Kuroba Toichi had said all that he needed to, and the blue flames flickered to nothing as he vanished, and Kaito knew he would forever have his father's words etched into his brain even as he whispered "I love you" to nothing.

{}

"Hi, you've reached Kudo Shinichi. Please leave a message after the beep. If you're calling about a case, make certain to leave your name, the names of any suspects and victims and your phone number after the beep."

"Please, Shinichi… I'm sorry. This should never have been your price to pay. I thought it would be me. I thought it _was_ me. That's why we left you behind, understand? We weren't afraid of you. I thought it was following _me._ I made the bargain, and I would gladly pay it every day of my life, but… it should never have been you. I'm sorry, Shinichi. I'm sorry…"

{}

It took hours and hours and _days_ of talking. Of where the line between "I won't let you if you won't let me" and "on my father's grave" was. Of what to do with a man who begs to die. Of what to do when only you know how to kill a man who craves death and without you will _never_ have it. Of euthanasia and murder.

Of hundreds, _thousands_ of lives paid for one. It shouldn't have been mathematical but sometimes it was, when the one _forced_ it to be, when the one had moved things from the realm of theory and magic and superstition to _serial killing,_ when there were an increasing number of random shootings of random minor criminals and surely mugging or drug dealing was deserving of prison, not execution? Surely at least the fates of wrongdoers ought to have been decided by the courts, not by a vigilante

Because that was the _point_ of the Kaitou Kid, not to exact vengeance himself but to pull even the coldest of killers from the shadows and into the light where they could be seen, could be _judged_ for their sins

And people were _dying_ every day and Kudo Shinichi begged them to kill him, and Kuroba Toichi swore that he could not be disappointed, and Nakamori Ginzo had fired his gun on armed criminals if it meant protecting the lives of others.

They knew what they had to do, they were just afraid to do it. But being a police officer meant protecting others even when you were afraid, and Poker Face meant that your emotions were always under your control, and so they called him and told him.

"We have to redo the death that was undone."

{}

"I thought you'd find me sooner than this."

"It felt invasive to track you down like a common criminal. But you gave me no choice."

"Is that all I am, now? I don't exactly have a choice. I understand that now. So long as I live, _somebody_ has to die."

"…Where did you get the guns?"

"The guys trying to kill the Kaitou Kid had plenty. Better them than one of the officers chasing the Kid, right?"

"That isn't how it has to be."

"Yes. It is. That's the bargain _you_ made. I'm making a different one."

{}

Aoko's hands repeatedly clenched and unclenched around the steering wheel, waiting for some urgent alert on the police radio that she could rush to. Kaito constantly thought, as every second ticked by, of how he could have disguised them, of ways to steal a car and ditch it and leave no evidence, but Aoko point-blank refused to do this without consequences. It was a needful thing, but that didn't make it a _good_ thing.

Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons was not the same thing as doing the right thing. He'd once asked her to remind him of that. He wished he hadn't.

Kudo Shinichi was near the crosswalk, speaking to his mother. Kaito didn't know if she knew what was about to happen. Would it be easier for her to know, to prepare herself, or not to know, to neither have to condone nor condemn her son's choice?

Kaito closed his hands over Aoko's on the wheel, fully prepared to admit to distracting her. He was willing to admit to being Kid, having snuck into his favourite pursuer's car as a prank, to having distracted her while she was driving, to have been the cause of a man going under her wheels. Snake was dead, and in the wake of his corpse's identification, the criminal faction that he was a part of was crumbling; if the Kaitou Kid served no further purpose than this, so be it.

Let Pandora end, because it needed to. Let Kudo Shinichi end, because he longed to.

Just let it be time. Time to end this. Time to do what they swore on their fathers' graves to do, and be done with it, and spend their lives justifying it to each other.

But when Kudo looked at his phone, kissed his mother on the cheek, stepped into the road, it wasn't in front of their car. It was in front of a car that came careening around the corner, far too fast, and yet managed to turn far too tight, tight enough to wind up on two wheels, crushing the detective's chest and smashing his head into the ground before crashing into a traffic light and bursting into inexplicably blue-tinged flames.

Kaito called for an ambulance while Aoko cordoned off the area. Kudo Yukiko held her son's hand, holding him as perhaps she'd prepared to do ten years ago, holding him while he died. The controlled calmness on her Poker Face was enough to tell Kaito that she'd prepared to do it today.

It was Kudo Yukiko who, while police were swarming over the scene, scooped something from her son's blood and pressed it into Aoko's hand. "Destroy it," the former mother whispered, looking from her son's painfully peaceful corpse to the burning car on the side of the road. The driver would no doubt have to be identified by dental records, so thorough was the conflagration, and yet she already knew who took it upon themselves to recreate Kudo Shinichi's death, to shoulder that responsibility. "Please. Just end it."

Aoko opened her hand to reveal the tear-shaped red jewel. It was the greatest pleasure of her life to drop it to the ground and watch it crack as it hit asphalt. It was the greatest pleasure of Kaito's to grind it under his heel.

They never do find out how it came to be. They attended Kudo Shinichi's and Kudo Yuusaku's funerals: they commiserated with a pair of police officers cuddling a baby boy; a portly older officer who said nothing, but watched the caskets with profoundest regret; editors of unfinished stories; FBI and CIA agents with shadows in their eyes; a strawberry-blonde middle-schooler who stood alone, afraid to be near any other living human; a former actress who was both a widow and something without a label, because how can any word encapsulate the loss of a parent who buries their child?

In the end, all they could say was their sympathies, their apologies for what they could have done. In the end, they never knew what they are in the dark, in the moment of decision, at the time to choose.

They never found out what became of Pandora's shell, either. When it turned up missing, they assumed that it had vanished when its core was destroyed.

{}

The woman who had been her own mother, been her own daughter, been her own ghost too many times to count smiled as she held an empty diamond, nestled in the palm of her hand. Opportunity would come again; it always had. Elena Miyano had come closest, so sure of what she'd achieved that she'd tested it on her own child, but she hadn't managed to replicate the miracle without the curse and it was the curse that had claimed her, claimed her husband, claimed her first daughter, claimed all but the girl who sat alone in an empty laboratory where just yesterday an old man had been torn to pieces by the shrapnel of one of his own failed creations, ignoring the phone calls of a boy who had offered her a shoulder to cry on at a classmate's funeral the previous year and been rebuffed, as he ever would be, as she curled into her own shell of endless isolation, despair wherein hope would always be ripped away

Because hope was held by Pandora, and belonged to her alone.

{}

{}

 _Happy Halloween, all!_


End file.
